Why Trump-Putin summit is in Helsinki

The venue for the US-Russia summit, Helsinki, holds historical significance for diplomatic relations between the two long-time rivals.

In 1975, the US and Russia - then the key power in the Soviet Union - along with 33 other states, signed a major agreement in Helsinki to defuse Cold War tensions.

Known as the Helsinki Final Act, the agreement was reached at a security conference attended by the then US president Gerald Ford and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, among others.

The second important meeting between the US and Russian leaders in Helsinki took place in 1990, when president George Bush met his Russian counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev to discuss Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, which would later lead to a US intervention and the first Gulf War.

Bill Clinton also met Boris Yeltsin in Helsinki in 1997, when the two presidents discussed the expansion of NATO in the Baltic countries. It was during this meeting that Clinton invited Russia to join G7, which then became the G8.

Things may yet come full circle at Helsinki: Russia was expelled from the group over the Ukraine crisis; but ahead of a G7 summit last month, Trump suggested Russia should be welcomed back into the fold.

Finland as a whole, which claimed independence from the Russian Empire in 1917, has historically maintained a neutral stance in disputes between Russia and the West. During the Cold War, Finland had good trade and diplomatic relations with both sides.

To date, although a part of the European Union, Finland has not joined NATO like most of EU member states, and is able to retain strategic neutrality in the region.

Perhaps for this reason, the Finnish capital was the venue for talks in 2008 between the then chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, Mike Mullen, and Russian military chief Nikolai Makarov in the wake of Russia's war on Georgia.

Finland also hosted unofficial talks between representatives from North Korea, South Korea and the US earlier this year, in anticipation of the summits between North and South Korea, and later between North Korea and the US.